Hello! I'm an associate professor of Chinese literature and culture in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University, as well as a writer and translator. My core research, including my first book on Chinese prose poetry, is about poetry and hermeneutics, both how we can understand (and decide with confidence that we understand) poetry and how poetry helps us understand the rest of the world. I believe that mixing theory with practice improves both undertakings, so my research interests often lead me toward translation, genre study, sociological models of artistic practice, and other kinds of attention to the relationships between artists, editors and readers.

I was born in St. Louis, Missouri and received a bachelor's degree in English Literature and Chinese, then a Masters of Fine Arts in poetry writing from Washington University in St. Louis, where I spent a year as a poet in residence. Around this time, I taught English language and literature at Southeast University in Nanjing and English language at the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics in Dalian. I got a Ph. D. in Chinese literature from the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, after which I taught Chinese culture and introductory language at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. At Cornell, I've taught a wide variety of courses including Introduction to China (a survey of history and culture from prehistory to the present), Contemporary Chinese Popular Culture, several classes on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, a translation workshop, and a course on scholarly writing for the graduate students in Asian Studies.

If you'd like to connect with me on social media, I am most active on Twitter (@nadmussen) but also have a profile at Poets & Writers. I travel to speak on a variety of topics in both English and Chinese; you can see a general-audience lecture I gave for Cornell's Contemporary China Initiative here. My abbreviated CV, with direct links to much of my online work, is available here.